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Archive for September, 2011:

There is a new change to the skill training in trunk. You don’t have to practise skills to learn them anymore, you can select them starting right at level 0. On the other hand, you need to have some means of training a skill to be able to select it.

To train a weapon skill, you need to carry a weapon of the appropriate type, but you don’t have to wield it. For ranged weapons, carrying a launcher is enough, no need to have missiles.
For armour, you need to wear any armour with an evasion penalty (at least leather). For shields you need to be wearing one. If you can cast condensation shield or have the divine shield ability, that works too.
Spell schools can be trained as soon as you have a spell of the school memorised (whatever the success chance). You can train evocations if you carry any evocable item (no need to wear jewellery or wield rods). For Invocations you can train it if you have a divine ability that uses it.
Fighting, UC, throwing, dodging, stealth, stabbing, T&D and spellcasting can always be trained, there’s no restrictions on them.

Another recent change was made regarding skill levels. You now gain benefit from partial skill levels. This is why it is now displayed with a decimal in the skill screen. For example, casting a dual school spell with both skills at 2.5 is the same as having one skill at 2.0 and the other at 3.0, while it used to be the same as having both at 2.0. You gain a spell slot when spellcasting reaches 2.5, and another when it reaches 3.0.

For those not familiar with the 0.9 skill system, let me recap the changes that were made. XP pool has been removed. When you gain XP, it is immediately spread across the activated skills. The amount of XP attributed to each skill depends on the training percentage. In manual mode, your actions are ignored and XP is spread evenly across all activated skills. In automatic mode, the training percentages depend on which skills you have used recently.
You can also set a skill to focus (marked with *). Doing so will train the skill twice as fast (relative to others of course). In auto mode, if the skill has a very low training percentage, setting it to focus will raise it to around 20% instead of doubling.

Two options have been added:
default_manual_training: if you like to play in manual mode, set this to true and the skill training mode will default to manual instead of auto.
skill_focus: if you don’t want to set skills to focus, set this option to false. This will revert the behaviour to the simple disable/enable toggle, instead of the 3 states disable/enable/focus. If you want to change it in-game, set this option to toggle and you’ll be able to change it from within the skill screen.

There is a new thread in the Tavern, dealing with Implementables. It’s a good place to indicate what features you’d like to see – of the list of current Implementables on Mantis, but you can also lobby for other features beyond that.

We are happy to collect what’s been going on during the last three weeks in the dungeons. Despite rather minimal advertisement, the tournament was quite successful. A little late, but not too late, did we see 0.9 Webtiles kick into action.

The winning player is theglow with 4934 points, who won 15 games, including an 8 streak! Runner up is mikee with 4653 points, who won 11 out of 13 games, including an 10 streak (actually 11 games in a row, but two wizards in the list). The competition was close, mikee might have won if his level 16 Spriggan Enchanter would not have died to an orb guardian in Zot:5. The third player to get more than 4000 points is jeanjacques with 4333 points.

Another highlight: 78291 played the fastest game, both in real time (2:32 hours) and turn count (19460), winning a Deep Dwarf of Elyvilon. He only killed 64 creatures himself, thus proving the power of pacifism.

The most successful clans were: The Adorable Catlobes with 14201 points, followed by wucad mu-tang clan aint nuthin ta fuck wit with 9074 points and Zignacio with 8276 points.